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Fulltext Search Filter is Back!

Hi everyone, fulltext search is back! Next up, no-fee and filter by age. Sorry they didn’t make the relaunch.

A little primer on how the fulltext search works.

If you just put some words into the box, it’ll require that ALL of those words appear in the ad.

If you want to do something a bit more nuanced, there’s a pretty advanced query syntax you can use to get exactly what you want.

To get listings that include one OR the other, put a pipe character | between the words.ex: bath | tub | garage will get listings that include any of the words bath, tub, or garage.

To only get listings that DON’T include a word, put a minus – or exclamation point ! in front of the word.ex: -basement will exclude listings that mention the word basement

If you want to match a phrase, like “hot tub”, put quotes around the phrase. Let’s say I want a hot tub, but I don’t know how it’ll be written, so I need to include a couple spellings.ex: “hot tub” | hottub will get either spelling

If you want to get really fancy, you can group sets of searches with parentheses.ex: (hot tub) | (basement roof) will get things that include hot and tub, or basement and roof (or 3 or 4/4 of those words).

Yeah, I like them too. That’s why I brought the keyword filter back, and I just re-added the age filter and no-fee. Price per bedroom/person is probably coming back, but the overlays will require a bit more thought. We’d like to get there, though. Anything else you hate about the new one?

From a practical perspective, we had to update the code base – it was on an old version of Google maps that Google might not support well in the future, and it didn’t work at all on mobile. The backend had many years of cruft in it, and it was becoming harder to maintain. You might argue that we should maintain the old desktop site alongside the mobile, but from a practical perspective, it’s much harder to support two sites at the same time – every time you want to do something new, you have to do it twice. So, we had to consolidate.

We’ll get this one to a state where it’s better than the old one in every way, it’ll just take a little time. Already, though, it’s much snappier, works on all devices, and the backend (which you don’t get to see) is so, so much better to work on.